Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize | Hacker News Reader

Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize

nature.com

44 pointsKC8ZKF7 comments

Direct link to the video. http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2010/impossible-m...

It's well worth clicking through to the video linked from the article. The illusion is very simple and very convincing; it's a simple matter of perspective, but even after seeing how it works I can't make myself see it "right".

Same here. It's totally mind blowing.

I just don't know if I'd have the same problem if it wasn't a video but I had the subject right in front of me. But since it won a illusion prize, I guess my answer is already there.

For whatever reason, Japanese vision researchers seem to do this sort of thing a lot. At the ex-ex-day job, where we had a robot vision lab, I'd get a "Check out this demo from X at Y university" email at least twice a week.

Dr. Kitaoka was our office favorite:

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

A true gold-mine of illusions.

The "Kochi-jo castle and Kinkaku" illusison ( http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/tagi3e.html ) is quite fascinating. Close-by observers see one castle and far-away observers see an other castle.

I wonder if you could use this technique in marketing. Where you would have a sign that showed different things, depending on how far away you are standing.

Close-by observers see one castle and far-away observers see an other castle.

There's also an old version with faces, which I found even more impressive: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/435058989_9d83960682_o.jp...

Take a few steps back and the faces swap!

I have seen optical effects used on billboards but not this exact one, yet. Perhaps it's hard to achieve a good effect at billboard size.

Those are great, but I can't look at too many in succession. (Maybe a good rating system for optical illusions would be the number seizures induced per thousand epileptics.)

My favorite among the contest winners was absolutely stumped by the Monkey Business illusion: http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2010/the-monkey-b...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com